Upcoming Tanking Changes (Druids & Warriors)

In case you missed it, Eyonix has been making posts about upcoming class changes and a post a couple of days ago focused on Druids and Warriors, which included some changes to how we will be tanking in the future.

DRUID

Savage Defense – this is a new passive ability. When a druid in Dire Bear form deals a melee critical strike, the druid gains a damage shield equal to 25% of their attack power. The next hit completely removes the shield regardless of how much damage was done.

Survival of the Fittest has had its bonus armor reduced to compensate for the above increase in damage mitigation.

Faerie Fire (and similar debuffs) now reduces armor by 5%. See Sunder Armor in the warrior update below for additional details.

Thorns and Nature’s Grasp can be cast in Tree of Life form.

Survival Instincts now works in Moonkin form.

Replenish – to avoid confusion, this talent has been renamed “Revitalize.” It now also works with Wild Growth.

We are also looking at increasing the sustained (not burst) damage of feral druids in cat form.

WARRIOR

Changing stances now has a much reduced cost: you lose a maximum of 20 rage (10 with Tactical Mastery). For example, if you have 100 rage and change stances, you will have 80 rage remaining. If you have 10 rage and change stances, all of your rage is lost. In addition, we may change the penalties associated with some stances.

You now gain rage when damage done to you is absorbed, such as through a Power Word: Shield.

Blood Frenzy now causes 2/4% physical damage done.

Sunder Armor (and similar debuffs) now reduces armor by 4% per application, and is now a single rank. Creature armor has been globally reduced so that debuffed targets should take about the same damage from physical attacks that they did before this change. The net effect should be that this debuff is slightly less mandatory in PvE and is not disproportionately more powerful against cloth targets in PvP.

We are also adding increased damage to Arms, possibly through Overpower or Slam.

We are also looking at granting rage when the warrior blocks, dodges or parries.

Some very strange changes to armor debuffing, but important none the less.

Comments

Seems like they want to make the Sunder effect slightly less devastating to Clothies in PVP (which… I mean really.. 2-3k armor isn’t helping them anyway, but I’m not a PVP guy. Maybe Sunder is a problem for them) without gimping it too much in PVE. Still, if that and Rage conservation while stance dancing are the only things they can find to dork with on Prots, then I’m a happy slab of armored beef.

I am somewhat intrigued with the Bear Shield. From what I’ve seen we’re talking about an extra 800 damage resisted after each Crit, and bears have really pretty good crit%… it COULD be a good deal. Depends on how much the Armor boost from SotF gets nerfed.